Personalised Photo Blanket UK: Sizes, Fabric, Ideas and Real Prices

The short version

• Three sizes cover nearly everything. 100 x 70 cm is a lap blanket or a pram blanket. 150 x 100 cm is the sofa size most people want. 200 x 150 cm covers a double bed. MYPICTURE prices these at £35, £42 and £75.

• Fabric weight is the honest quality tell. Weight is measured in gsm (grams per square metre). Anything under about 300 gsm is a thin, single layer blanket. Around 500 to 600 gsm is a proper two layer throw. If a seller does not publish a gsm figure, assume it is on the lighter side.

• The print method decides whether it fades. Dye sublimation pushes the ink into the fibre itself. Surface printing sits on top and cracks. MYPICTURE uses dye sublimation, which is why the blanket can be machine washed at 30°C without the colours dulling.

• The photo matters more than the blanket. A blurry photo on a 600 gsm blanket still looks blurry. For the smallest size you want roughly 3,900 x 2,800 pixels. For the largest, use a collage rather than one stretched photo.

• The middle size is the best value. At MYPICTURE, the 100 x 70 cm blanket works out at about £50 per square metre. The 150 x 100 cm works out at about £28. You pay £7 more and get more than double the blanket.

• Whichever you choose, wash it cool, skip the fabric softener and let it air dry. That is the whole care routine.

Why a photo blanket beats most personalised gifts

Most personalised gifts get looked at once and then put on a shelf. A blanket gets used. It sits on the back of a sofa, it goes over a lap during a film, it ends up in a car boot for a match on a cold Saturday. The photo stays in daily life rather than in a drawer.

That also makes it a safer gift than it looks. You do not need to know someone's taste in art or their colour scheme. You only need one good photo of something they care about. This is why photo blankets sell hardest in November and December: search demand for photo blankets in the UK runs roughly five to six times higher in December than in June.

There is one practical thing worth checking before you buy, especially for a baby or a young child. Look for an OEKO-TEX STANDARD 100 certificate, or a clear statement that the inks are non toxic. OEKO-TEX tests finished textiles against a long list of harmful substances, and its strictest tier, Product Class 1, applies to products for babies and children up to three years old. MYPICTURE states that the inks used on its blankets are non toxic and hypoallergenic.

If you are new to the category, it also helps to know the difference between a throw and a blanket, because the words get used loosely. We cover that in our guide to what a throw blanket is.

Photo blanket sizes in the UK: which one fits what

Size is the decision people get wrong most often. A blanket that looks generous on screen can turn out to be a lap warmer. Here are the three personalised photo blanket sizes MYPICTURE makes, with what each one actually covers.

Size (cm)	Size (inches)	Price	Best for	Cost per m²
100 x 70	39 x 28	£35.00	Lap blanket, pram or pushchair, a child's bed, a keepsake for display	£50.00
150 x 100	59 x 39	£42.00	The standard sofa throw. One adult under it comfortably, two at a push	£28.00
200 x 150	79 x 59	£75.00	Covers a double bed. Two adults on a sofa. Big enough to sit on outdoors	£25.00

Prices checked on my-picture.co.uk in August 2026. Cost per square metre is our own calculation and it is the most useful number in the table. The 100 x 70 cm blanket has 0.7 m² of fabric and costs £50 per m². The 150 x 100 cm has 1.5 m² and costs £28 per m². Stepping up from the small to the medium costs £7 and more than doubles the blanket.

For comparison, other UK sellers use similar dimensions. Bags of Love list four sizes from 100 x 73 cm up to a queen size at 198 x 145 cm. Boots Photo list three, from 75 x 100 cm up to 140 x 200 cm. Snapfish and Printerpix do not publish dimensions on their main blanket pages, which makes them hard to compare properly.

One rule of thumb. If the blanket is for a specific person to use, buy the size up from what you think you need. If it is for display, or for a baby, the smallest size usually looks neater and folds better.

Fabric and printing: what actually makes a blanket last

Two specifications separate a blanket that lasts from one that does not, and neither of them appears in the product photo.

• Fabric weight, measured in gsm. This is grams per square metre. It tells you how much fabric is actually there. A single layer polar fleece blanket is commonly around 285 gsm. Stitch two of those together and you get roughly 570 gsm, which is what Bags of Love publish for their photo blankets. Heavier fabric drapes better, resists pilling, and does not go see-through at the edges.

• The printing method. Dye sublimation turns the ink into a gas that bonds with the fibre. The colour becomes part of the fabric rather than a layer sitting on it. The alternative, a surface or transfer print, feels slightly stiff or plasticky when you run a hand over the design, and it is the type that cracks and peels after repeated washing.

MYPICTURE blankets are made from polar fleece with an extra layer of plush on top, and the print is applied by dye sublimation. That combination is why the care instruction is simply a 30°C machine wash rather than hand wash only. Boots Photo use 100% polyester with a 5 mm layer and carry an OEKO-TEX STANDARD 100 certificate.

Here is the honest bit. MYPICTURE does not publish a gsm figure for its blankets, and Bags of Love does. If a specific fabric weight matters to you, that is a fair point in their favour, and it is worth saying so. What MYPICTURE does publish is the fabric construction, the print method and the wash temperature, which most sellers do not.

The rough guide: if a blanket is very cheap, something has been cut. Usually it is the gsm, sometimes it is a single layer instead of two, and occasionally it is the print method. A £9 blanket is not a scam. It is a thin blanket, and if you know that going in, it may still be exactly what you want.

Choosing the right photo, and the resolution you need

This is where most disappointing blankets come from. A photo that looks perfect on a phone screen is being blown up to the size of a bed. The screen is about 15 cm wide. The blanket may be 200 cm wide.

Fabric is more forgiving than paper or canvas, because the fleece texture hides a little softness and you rarely look at a blanket from 30 cm away. Even so, there is a floor. The table below shows a sensible minimum for each size, worked out at roughly 100 pixels per inch.

Blanket size	Minimum pixels	Megapixels	Where that comes from
100 x 70 cm	3,900 x 2,800	About 11 MP	A modern phone photo just about covers this. A 12 MP phone shoots 4,032 x 3,024
150 x 100 cm	5,900 x 3,900	About 23 MP	A recent flagship phone in its highest quality mode, or any mirrorless or DSLR camera
200 x 150 cm	7,900 x 5,900	About 46 MP	A high resolution camera only. For this size, use a collage instead

That last row is the one nobody tells you. Almost no ordinary photo will fill a 200 x 150 cm blanket at full quality. The solution is not a better camera, it is a different layout. In a collage, each individual photo covers a much smaller area, so a normal phone photo is perfectly sharp. That is a large part of why the photo collage blanket exists.

Four more things that decide whether a photo works on fabric:

• Use the original file, not a screenshot. A photo saved from WhatsApp, Instagram or a group chat has been compressed, often more than once. Go back to the camera roll or the original email.

• Bright, even light beats a dramatic one. Dim indoor photos lose detail in the shadows when printed on fleece. Daylight photos hold up best.

• Keep faces away from the edges. Blanket shapes rarely match photo shapes, so something gets cropped. Leave a margin around anything you care about.

• Simple beats busy. One clear subject prints better than a crowded scene with twelve small faces. If you have twelve faces, that is a collage, not a single image.

MYPICTURE's uploader will warn you if a file is too small for the size you picked, which saves you finding out after delivery. If you want the full detail on this, we go deeper in our guide to photo print resolution.

15 personalised photo blanket ideas

Grouped by who the blanket is for, because that is how people actually decide.

For couples and anniversaries

1. The first photo. Use the earliest picture you have of the two of you, printed large and on its own. It works because it is usually a bad photo, and that is the point.

2. Map and photo. A single favourite holiday shot with the place name and date printed underneath. Quiet, and it ages well.

3. Handwriting. Scan a note, a card or a signature and print it alongside one photo. This is the idea people cry at.

For grandparents

4. The full family collage. Everyone, one photo each, arranged in a grid. Get the number of photos right rather than the number of people: eight to twelve prints clearly, thirty does not.

5. The grandchildren grid. Only the grandchildren, one per panel, with names underneath. Easy to reorder as the family grows.

6. A scanned old photo. A wedding photo from the 1960s, scanned properly and printed large. Older photos often look better on fabric than on glossy paper, because the fleece softens the grain.

For new babies and children

7. The birth details blanket. One newborn photo plus name, date, weight and time. This is the single most common photo blanket order in the UK.

8. Children's artwork. Photograph a drawing from the fridge and print it at blanket size. Cheaper than framing and far more likely to survive.

9. The milestone blanket. Twelve photos, one per month of the first year. Design it in December when you have all twelve.

For pets

10. One portrait, nothing else. A single close up of the dog or cat on a plain background. Pet faces print beautifully because the fur has natural contrast.

11. A blanket for the pet, not the owner. The smallest size, printed with the pet's own photo, put in their bed. It sounds daft and it is extremely popular.

For memory and remembrance

12. The memory blanket. Photos of someone who has died, chosen by the family rather than one person. Keep it to six or eight images and leave space between them.

13. The holiday of a lifetime. One landscape photo, printed edge to edge. Landscapes suit the widest blanket sizes better than portraits do.

Around the home and outdoors

14. The outdoor blanket. Something you are happy to put on grass or a touchline. A personalised picnic blanket is the harder wearing option if it will live in the car.

15. The sofa styling blanket. A photo chosen for its colours rather than its subject. A beach, a moorland, a close up of a flower. It reads as a furnishing first and a photo second.

If you want the blanket to match something else in the room, a personalised photo cushion from the same photo set is the usual pairing, and it keeps the total under most gift budgets.

What a personalised photo blanket costs in the UK

Prices in this category are wider apart than in almost any other photo gift. Here is what the main UK sellers were charging in August 2026, taken from their own websites and from live search results.

Seller	Price from	Smallest size	Largest size	Fabric weight published
MYPICTURE	£35.00	100 x 70 cm	200 x 150 cm	No (polar fleece plus plush layer stated)
Bags of Love	£33.45*	100 x 73 cm	198 x 145 cm	Yes, 570 gsm
Boots Photo	£37.99	75 x 100 cm	140 x 200 cm	No (100% polyester, 5 mm layer)
Snapfish	£18.49	Not published	Not published	No
Printerpix	£4.99	Not published	Not published	No
photoblanket.co.uk	£9.95	Not published	Not published	Yes, 285 gsm single layer

*Bags of Love price is a sale price, reduced from a list price of £60.00. Printerpix list a range up to £69.99. Figures checked August 2026 and every one of these services discounts frequently, so treat them as a starting point rather than a fixed price.

Read that table carefully and a pattern appears. The cheapest headline prices belong to the sellers who publish the least information. The £9.95 blanket is a 285 gsm single layer, which is genuinely thin. The £33.45 blanket is 570 gsm, which is double. They are not the same product and comparing their prices tells you almost nothing.

A worked example: what you actually pay

Say you want a sofa sized blanket, delivered, for one gift.

At MYPICTURE, the 150 x 100 cm blanket is £42.00. Delivery is free once your basket passes £49, so a blanket on its own does not qualify. Add a £10 photo cushion and the basket is £52.00 with free delivery, which is £52 for two gifts. Order the blanket alone and you pay £42 plus a delivery charge.

At Bags of Love, the small blanket at £33.45 plus £5.99 UK delivery comes to £39.44 delivered, for a blanket that is 100 x 73 cm rather than 150 x 100 cm.

So the two are close on money and far apart on what arrives. This is the honest position: MYPICTURE is not the cheapest photo blanket in the UK, and Snapfish's £18.49 starting price is well below ours. What MYPICTURE does have is a Lowest Price Guarantee, which beats any like for like UK price by 5%. A company willing to do that is effectively doing the comparison shopping for you.

How to wash a photo blanket so the print survives

Photo blankets fail in three ways: the print dulls, the fleece pills into little bobbles, or the fibres flatten and the blanket stops feeling soft. All three are heat problems.

• Wash at 30°C, not higher. Every major UK seller specifies 30°C. It also uses roughly 40% less energy over a year than washing at higher temperatures, according to the Energy Saving Trust, so there is no reason to go hotter.

• Skip the fabric softener. Softener coats the fibres. On fleece that flattens the pile and dulls the print. Use a mild detergent and nothing else.

• Wash it on its own, or with soft items. Zips, buttons and denim are what cause pilling. Keep them out of the load.

• Air dry if you can. If you must tumble dry, use the lowest heat setting and take it out slightly damp.

• Do not iron, steam or dry clean it. Direct heat on a printed fleece is the fastest way to ruin one. If the blanket is creased, hang it up for a day.

Treated this way, a dye sublimated blanket should keep its colour for years. The print cannot peel off because it is inside the fibre rather than on top of it.

Ordering in time: production and delivery

Photo blankets are made to order, so the clock starts when you place the order, not when the courier collects it.

MYPICTURE quotes two to three days to produce a blanket, then delivery on top. Bags of Love quote one to two days to make. Neither figure includes the courier leg, so plan on roughly a week from order to doorstep in normal conditions.

For Christmas, work backwards. Add the production time, the courier time, and then a few days of buffer, because December is the busiest month in this category by a wide margin. Ordering by the end of the first week of December is comfortable. Ordering in the week before Christmas is a gamble, and it is the week when the cheapest sellers run out of capacity first.

For Mothering Sunday, note the UK date rather than the American one. In 2026 Mothering Sunday falls on 15 March, which is several weeks earlier than Mother's Day in the United States.

Three questions to settle which blanket to buy

1. Will it be used, or looked at? If it will be used on a sofa most evenings, buy on gsm and buy the 150 x 100 cm size. If it is a keepsake for display, the smallest size looks neater and costs less.

2. How good is your best photo, honestly? If your best file is a phone photo, that is fine for the small or medium size, or for a collage at any size. It is not enough for one image stretched across 200 x 150 cm.

3. Who is it for? For a baby, prioritise the safety certification and the smallest size. For a grandparent, prioritise a collage with a sensible number of photos. For a partner, one photo printed large almost always beats a montage.

If the answers pull in different directions, the medium size with a two or three photo layout is the compromise that disappoints nobody. It is also the best value per square metre.

Why Choose MYPICTURE Over Other UK Photo Printing Services?

MYPICTURE is a value led printer rather than a premium one. Blankets are made from polar fleece with an extra plush layer, printed by dye sublimation with non toxic inks, produced in two to three days and machine washable at 30°C. Prices start at £35 and delivery is free on orders over £49. We are not the cheapest starting price in the UK, and we have said so above. What we do offer is a Lowest Price Guarantee and a review record built on a very large number of orders.

Buyer's Guide	MY-PICTURE	Snapfish	Photobox
Trust Pilot Ratings	4.5/5	4.3/5	4.1/5
Photo Prints (6×4")	from £0.07	£0.08	£0.13
Canvas Prints (20×20 cm)	£4.50*	£9.49	£14.99
Photo Books (from)	£8.00	£10.49	£12.99
Lowest Price Guarantee	Yes	No	No

If you have a photo you like and a size in mind, you can design a personalised photo blanket in a few minutes with MYPICTURE and see the preview before you pay.

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